“Guess you like the way I look in the light,” Adriana said with a chuckle as she climbed back on the couch. She helped me scoot down some, then swung her leg over, taking my cock and aligning it with her warm entrance.
“Ade . . . wait,” I said, trying to twist to the side and failing as a spear of pain shot up my lower back. “No protection.”
She ignored me, lowering herself an inch onto my cock. Both of us stopped, and my eyes opened wide at the feeling. She paused, her eyes closed and her head thrown back, biting her lower lip and smiling. I'd never seen a more beautiful sight in all my life, and my heart melted again at the sight of her. “Oh God, that's good.”
Opening her eyes as she sank down, she saw the expression on my face. “Daniel Neiman, don't tell me this is a first for you too?”
I nodded, still unable to speak. It felt so good, and she leaned forward to kiss me. “Well then, I'm glad it's me who gets to give you a first for once,” she said, allowing her hips to settle against mine.
She rose, her pussy gripping my cock and massaging it wonderfully before she lowered herself back down, both of us shaking at the pleasure. “I love you.”
“I love you too. Now, hold on,” Adriana said, planting her hands on either side of my head, grabbing the side of the couch. With a seductive, sexy grin, she started to ride my cock, her pussy gripping me perfectly, my cock caressed as it had never been before.
I brought my arm up. The muscles ached, but the pain was dulled by the passion and pleasure of our lovemaking. I lifted the supple warmth of her breast to my lips, sucking on the hard pebble of her nipple. I love tasting her skin. The way it feels in my mouth is unlike anything I've ever felt before. I nibbled and sucked on the tenderness as she rode me, loving me with all the strength our bodies had.
Pure happiness and pleasure radiated from my cock as Adriana started moving faster and faster, letting herself go and feeling the rise of orgasm inside her. Freeing her nipple, I looked up at her. Her mouth opened slightly in a sort of oval shape and her eyes dilated. “That's it, my love. Don't hold back.”
She heard my words but didn't respond, her hips moving faster and faster. Sweat broke out on her forehead as she plunged herself over and over onto me. I tried to help, but my arms were still too damaged and weak to do much more than encourage her—but it didn't matter. I could feel my own orgasm rising within me, my balls tightening and swelling as I rushed toward my climax.
“I'm going to . . .” I grunted, my hips moving out of my control. Adriana nodded, pushing herself harder and faster before freezing, her head thrown back and her hair like fire, a long wail building deep within her chest that peeled out of her mouth with the passion of untold depths. Her pussy clamped down on my cock, and I pushed one last time as my own body pushed over the edge and I held on as best I could. Adriana's legs gave out, and her body sank the last fraction of an inch onto my cock as I tumbled over the edge, claiming her as mine.
We lay, both of us panting at the effort of our lovemaking. “I love you,” Adriana whispered. “Forever.”
“Ade,” I whispered, kissing her hair. “You've made a true man out of me. Before, I was just a boy in an adult body, not ready to commit to any woman. But now that you're in my life, I feel complete and truly a man.”
She smiled and snuggled into my chest. “Good, because I'm not letting go of you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
I stroked her back and kissed her cheek. “Me too. Adriana, will you marry me?”
She froze for a second, then relaxed, sighing against my cheek. “Of course I will. I hope you don't mind a long engagement, though. I'd like to wait a little while, to see if we can reconcile with my mom, if nobody else. She deserves to see me get married. Besides, it'd give us more time to go on real dates, kind of do the whole regular relationship thing for a while at least.”
“I can do that,” I said. “Make you safe, reconcile with your family, and then get married. Sounds easy enough when you put it that way.”
Chapter 19
Adriana
It took Daniel nearly a week to recover from the majority of his bruises and wounds, during which time he and I spent most of our time in Carmen's apartment. She and I quickly bonded as friends, and I found the spicy, seductive, diminutive Latina a great match. Her life experiences were vastly different from mine, and she was more than willing to open up to me.
"You're up early, aren't you?” Carmen said.
I looked over at the clock and saw that it was nearing nine in the morning. “If you can say that. What are you doing awake? I figured you'd sleep until noon at least.”
She shrugged and changed the channel. “Tomorrow I probably will. But I never sleep all that much, although I'll probably try and take a nap before heading in today. She flipped channels again, settling on a game show on some cable channel and setting the remote down next to her. “You know, Adriana, you certainly don't fit the image I had of you.”
“You don't fit the image of a stripper either. Well, I mean, except for the bangin' bod.”
She patted her overdeveloped chest and laughed. “The best money can buy."
I couldn't help but laugh. “Carmen, I've thanked you a lot over the past few days, but I wanted to ask you something.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
"If things work out the way Daniel and I are planning, what's on your agenda after this?”
She shrugged. “Daniel talked to me about maybe getting out of the stripping game, and I told him about my dream of opening my own dance school, but I don't know now. I'm just happy that I'm helping some worthwhile people. Lucky for me, the Bertolis aren't scheduled for another pickup from the Club for another week. Already, word on the street is that the Godfather's losing his shit looking for you.”
“I guess he would be.” I sighed, feeling a bit of homesickness, but not regret. “Then again, he shouldn't have had Daniel beaten with a garden shovel either.”
“Were you really giving him a boob job when they kicked in the door?” Carmen asked suddenly with a laugh. “Damn, that's pretty low, interrupting one of those. And what a mood killer.”
“Especially since I was just figuring out how to do it,” I added.
We were both laughing when Daniel came in to interrupt. “By the way, we need to start planning on getting your fake ID. And we'll need to go to campus.”
“What for?” I asked, then slapped my head. “The registrar's.”
Daniel nodded. “If you don't go in, they'll void all your credits. If you want even a prayer of returning to your normal life, you're going to need to go in and fill out the paperwork for a sabbatical.”
I closed my eyes and rubbed at my temples, torn by indecision. “Daniel, if we go there, we've got a higher chance of running into Carlo's men. Besides, if we're going to restart our lives under new identities, who the hell cares if I'm listed as on sabbatical or dropped out anyway?”
Daniel reached across the table and took my hands, gently squeezing my fingers. “Ade, I care. I never went to college, and let's be honest, I'll never get the chance, as we explained. For those few weeks that I was taking you around campus, though, you let me get a glimpse at that world, and I saw what it could do for a quality person like yourself. If there is any chance of you going back to school and finishing your degree, I want you to do it. It's that important to me.”
I looked into his eyes, moved by his vehemence. I realized that for so long, years even, I'd underestimated him, lumping him in with so many of the other men in the Bertoli organization. Men who not only didn't care about college, but would never have fit in either. In Daniel, I saw the shining example that some of my more liberal classmates tried to hold up as a reason for their pie-in-the-sky schemes, the diamond in the rough who had been denied his maximum potential simply due to bad luck. At least in Daniel, he'd overcome most of it, in my opinion.
“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath and giving him my best smile. “We go in. What's the deadline?”
“We need to go in by Wednesday, I think,” he said, tapping his chin. “But we should probably get a Wi-Fi connection. Have you logged onto your school email and sent in the preliminary stuff? There will be some risk with it, especially if your uncle has hired people to put tracers on your email system, but we can work around that.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Simple,” Daniel said with a laugh. “We go to a coffee shop. This is Seattle, after all. What else are young hipsters supposed to do but go to coffee shops and cruise the net?”
I laughed and picked up his hands, kissing the fingers. “Daniel, you can be almost anything you want to be. But you, my love, are never going to be a hipster.”
We took thirty minutes to drive to a coffee shop, making sure we were as far from Carmen's Georgetown apartment as we could get. We drove south until we found a Wi-Fi spot—not a coffee shop, but a truck stop, of all places. I turned on my computer, taking a moment to realize that I hadn't even opened the lid since the morning I'd run from campus. I had seen Daniel using his, processing and gathering more information on Vincent Drake. I'd seen him tapping at his cellphone occasionally too, more than likely trading messages with his contacts, and occasionally with Drake himself, if I read his expressions properly.
“This is going to take a while. The connection here is slow,” I said as the little task bar started loading. “I wonder how many messages I've gotten.”
Unfortunately, I was wrong. I had over fifty messages on my email. “Should have remembered that Mom and Carlo are trying to contact me too,” I muttered. “Glad we're in a truck stop and not a coffee house.”
“Oh, we've still got plenty of money,” Daniel said, sipping. “I've been frugal over the past few years. I saved a lot of what I earned.”
“How much?” I asked, curious. “I mean, not that it matters, but I'm technically destitute at this point. And you did say we didn't have enough to live in Tahiti.”
Daniel leaned in, and I shivered as his warm breath tickled my ear. “Right now? About three million dollars.”
I nearly spit out my coffee and looked at him blankly. “What?”
“Uh-huh,” Daniel whispered. “Like I said, I saved a lot of what Carlo paid me. When I said not Tahiti, it was because I don't have enough for us to live in style in Tahiti. Not that we can't take a vacation.”
I looked through the messages, which were mostly the same, namely Carlo or Mom asking where I was and to contact them. It wasn't until the end and a new message came from Mom that I really felt it.
Dear Adriana, it began, different from the others, which normally started with just my name or Bella, I have prayed for the past few days that you are actually reading this, and are not captured or dead somewhere. No mother, regardless of her lifestyle, wants to go through that.
So I pray that you are reading this, and that you are safe. I understand why you did what you did, and I hope that you are with the man whom you love. I can't say I wasn't angry at first. I know that you tried to tell me. You tried to explain to me or convince me how much Daniel means to you. I should have been more understanding. You were guided by your heart, which is the same thing I did in marrying your father. If I hadn't, if he hadn't, we'd never have been blessed with you.
So I can't be angry with you anymore. I'm sad, however. I miss my daughter, and want to give her a hug again, or to talk about television, or any of a hundred other things we used to do together. Adriana, if you can at least trust me enough to not try and use this to track you down, can you spare your mother a few words? Just tell me that you're safe, that you're pursuing your dreams . . . and some day, maybe, that we'll see each other again.
I love you. You'll always be my little girl.
Your mother, Margaret
It took me ten minutes to stop crying from the simple message. Daniel put his arm around my shoulders, letting me have my tears. When they were gone, I sniffled and wiped my nose. “We're going in tomorrow,” I said softly. “No matter what, Daniel, I want to be able to see my mom again.”
“I agree,” Daniel replied. “In fact, send her a reply. Let her know you're safe. Then send the message to the registrar's. We can go in tomorrow to sign the paperwork.”
When we got back to the apartment, Carmen wasn't as enthusiastic about our plan. “Are you two loco?” she asked, her eyes wide. “Seriously, you're going to intentionally go to the one place where everyone knows you in order to fill out a single piece of paperwork?”
“It's something I have to do,” I said, sighing. I'd come to recognize that while Carmen rarely spoke with as heavy a Hispanic accent as she put on for work, she did let it slip a bit when she was emotional. “A sense of completion.”
“Oh, you're going to be complete, all right. Completely underground and buried,” she groaned, storming back and forth in the living room. “I can't believe you two! Seriously, what sort of Mafioso are you?”
“Two Mafioso who don't want that in their life anymore,” Daniel said quietly, and I jerked my head toward him, surprised. He looked at me and shrugged. “I kind of came to that realization over the past few days. Sorry if I didn't mention it to you yet. I guess it was going to be sort of an organic decision.”
I thought about it, then nodded. “So you don't want to be an enforcer anymore?”
“No,” Daniel said simply. “I want to be your husband.”
Carmen stopped her pacing and stared at Daniel, then at me. When I didn't say anything, she shook her head. “Well?”
“Well what?” I asked, then realized we hadn't told her about that either. “Sorry, he asked me a few days ago when you were at work. We're planning on a long engagement though. Think you'd like to be one of the bridesmaids?”
Carmen threw her hands up and walked away, muttering loudly to herself in Spanish, only to come back a moment later, still muttering before pointing at me. “You are absolutely insane. You decided you want to get married to a renegade Mafia enforcer, and now you ask a stripper to be one of your bridesmaids?”
“I asked a beautiful girl who's a good friend and a good person to be my bridesmaid,” I replied evenly. “Think about it.”
“Oh, I don't even need to. I'm in. Now, I've got two hours before I have to go in to work. Please talk me through your crazy plan so I don't have to think about it all night and can have some peace of mind. The boobies bounce much better when I have peace of mind.”
Chapter 20
Adriana
Our plan was simple, but still dangerous for a couple of reasons. First, we had to take Daniel's BMW. While the ghost gray car was known to both Vincent Drake and Uncle Carlo, since the rise in school shootings, campus security had been very strict on traffic control onto and off campus. We'd already had Daniel's BMW checked in, and he had a campus ID sticker in his front windshield. Carmen's Ford didn't, and if we tried to use that, we'd have to spend another ten to thirty minutes at the campus police station, time that we just didn't want to spend on campus.
So Daniel's car it was. Still, we dressed as inconspicuously as possible, with my red hair pulled back into a ponytail and tucked into a ball cap while Daniel looked as much like a bum as I'd ever seen him, in paint splattered jeans, an oversized long-sleeved rugby shirt, and his Jordans, which we'd scuffed and abraded to make them look used. Between the two of us, we looked like totally different people.
Pulling up in the parking lot closest to the front of the registrar's office, Daniel put the car in park and shut off the engine. “You ready?”
“Yeah,” I nodded, grabbing my backpack. It was the same backpack I'd picked up in my initial run from home, although with Carmen's help, I'd bought some clothes that fit a little bit better. There was being inconspicuous, and being too inconspicuous. “Come on, this shouldn't take too long.”
Part of going on sabbatical involved talking to a guidance counselor, so Daniel and I sat around in the office, waiting for one of them to become available. Finally, just as I was about to lose my mind at the i
ntolerable waiting, one of the counselors came out of their office. “Miss Bertoli? Hi, I'm Tim Drucker. If you can step into my office, please.”
Daniel and I got up, and Drucker looked uncomfortable. “Miss Bertoli, it's normal procedure that these meetings are—”
“Are done one on one,” I completed for him. “Mr. Drucker, Daniel has been with me on campus for weeks, and is part of the reason that I came in today. He stays by my side.”
Drucker nodded, still unconvinced, but the three of us went into his office. The counselors' offices on campus were tiny, practically cubicles with slightly thicker walls. I understood though. The number of students had skyrocketed over the past few years, meaning the administration had to hire more staff. More staff meant more offices, but buildings don't expand at the same rate as enrollment. Still, I did feel a bit cramped as Drucker and I took seats while Daniel remained standing. There wasn't a chair for him. “Would you like to grab a chair from outside, Mr. . . .?”
“Neiman. Daniel Neiman,” Daniel answered, his voice flat and robbed of all inflection. It was his Terminator voice, and I had to swallow a smile as Drucker went slightly pale. “And no, I would prefer to stand.”
“Oh . . . okay then,” Drucker stammered, then turned his attention to me. “Well, Miss Bertoli, I understand from your paperwork that you want to take a one semester to one year sabbatical, is that correct?”
“Yes,” I said, putting on my most charming smile. Daniel's intimidating presence urged some things along, but it was the time to gather flies with honey and not vinegar. “After the past couple of weeks, it's just not the right time for me to continue with my studies.”
“I see,” Drucker said, clearly not understanding. “Miss Bertoli, it's highly irregular for an upperclassman like yourself to take such a long sabbatical. In all honesty, most who do never come back and lose their place in our arts program.”
Over the Middle: A Sports Romance Page 36